An examination of how Butler challenges sexual norms, from the incest taboo in the Patternist series, to interspecies sex in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, to pedophilia and rape in Fledgling, and arguably all three of these in her short story Bloodchild. These stories show us how norms, particularly sexual ones, are flexible between worlds, cultures, and especially individuals.

Taken as a whole, the first season of The Legend of Korra failed, because of what the creators seemed to be setting in motion – call it a promise of great things to come, even – and how they did not deliver on that promise by the season finale…

Ever since the first airing of The Legend of Korra, fans have been abuzz with speculations over the identity of the masked antagonist, Amon. Some theories have been plausible, others have been completely asinine, like “Amon = Aang!” Seriously?

Who Fears Death, for its fatalistic structure, could have easily fallen into the trap of giving the overall plot precedence over the characters. Yet, on the contrary, the vast majority of the book was spent developing the characters as they traveled – no, were pulled along – towards their fate…

While we exalt or vilify real life figures, we know deep down that people are more complex than what their words or actions tell us, or what great good or great evil we might wish to project upon them. By contrast, heroes and villains also make things easy on us: they are easy to love and support, or easy to hate and blame for all that is wrong with the world…

Follow the Waves, written by Amal El-Mohtar, is a story filled with gorgeous, rhythmic language, of the sort to be expected from someone who is a poet first. It seems that nearly every paragraph is layered with multiple meanings, and contain phrases that we could even call verses…

It is one of the oldest clichés that the “forces of darkness” will set upon that which is good and “light”. In a medium where the heroes are most often white and characters of color – especially black characters – are reduced to plot devices, and in a society where power is designated along lines of “light” and “dark”, the old trope is necessarily racialized…

An analysis of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods — As the battle for “brain space” rages on, with each new scientific innovation, new interpretations of history, shifts in culture and society, we must reconcile these changes with the deep-seated desire in all of us to hold on to some part of our pasts…

The concept of self as a collection of interchangeable parts is consistent with our existential freedom to “reinvent” ourselves, once we recognize that we have the ability to do so. We can change how we interface with others, our outward appearance, our language, our gender, even to a point our “race” – at least with respect to our own internal concept of self, apart, if not completely removed from the perceptions of others…

Heinz Meaney’s implication is that our final advancement as human beings will be predicated upon the annihilation of the world itself. Faust seems to be suggesting we look at our “highly advanced” civilization for what it is – violent, invasive, and ultimately destructive….

We view the sunset through a different lens – one of morose, even pessimistic contemplation. The sun is not merely setting to rise another day, it is dying. The clouds are torn, suggesting that their condition is not natural, but has been inflicted upon them…

For all “darkness” figures into the thinking of fantasy authors, it is conspicuously absent from the features of the characters. Except the “dark lords” and such, who play off of the fact that darkness equates to evil in the white literary imagination. Tolkien took it a step further, equating not only darkness with evil in the abstract, but designing his evil characters – goblins, trolls, and the like – with Africanesque features…

In Flight, Alexie seems to be asking whether or not self-hatred can be neutralized through assimilation – that is, can Zits’s hatred of his own Indian-ness be dissolved into a claiming of his whiteness? Indeed whiteness itself is a product of assimilation, with Irish, Italian, German, and other European ethnicities blending within the “melting pot” to create a new racial paradigm.

Within the context of the novel, these details, which might be applied to say, a cooking accident in another book, convey so much more than just how the characters physically experience the world. They express all the tension and urgency of high stakes conflict and even combat, all without mentioning any of those things explicitly.

In spite of the near unanimously European-inspired cast of characters, Dragon Age: Origins demonstrates inclusion of diverse experiences in ways that no game has ever done before. Bioware has again established themselves as a trailblazer in an industry that so far has shied away from challenging the status quo or tackling tough issues.